While I was toying with MSIs custom power profiles in Windows yesterday I noticed that I get a 50% performance boost (in 3DMark 11) if I enable the "gaming" profile so I installed SiSoft Sandra to examine if it did anything special with the clock frequencies of my CPU/GPU.

When I was going to check the CPU info in Sandra the computer froze and I haven't been able to boot Windows in any way since (regular boot, safe mode, boot repair, system repair, MSI recovery, Windows 7 install disk - all hang on the Windows logo (not safe mode, it hangs after loading all .sys files)).

I suspect something is broke, but the weird thing is that my Gentoo install works as usual.

I've got a few MCE errors related to CPU throttling because of temperature, but that shouldn't really be the issue here since the CPUs are throttled.

I tried running memtest86(+), it won't load at boot because it won't fit into RAM, I found a workaround using the .netbsd binary instead but that doesn't work either.

Any ideas to what I can do or how I can find out if anything is broken?_________________#312470 @ http://counter.li.org/

Lets see. Windows broke when you were running windows but Gentoo (which was not running) is still ok.
It sounds like something happened, possibly due to overclocking, to break windows.

You should never get MCEs due to overheating. That indicates the cooling system is inadequate, needs cleaned or something.
The CPU may make errors before the throttling kicks in, so Windows may have committed suicide.

If you don't have the RAM for memtest86, you can't run Linux or Windows either. That memtest86+ failing to load is odd._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Note that on some computers this does not work and results in an "Error
28: Selected item cannot fit into memory" reported by grub. The problem
here is that memtest86+ uses the legacy linux loading mechanism which
expects to be loaded at 0x9A000 in memory. On some systems the BIOS uses a
part of the memory closely after this address and correctly reserves it in
the e820 memory map. Grub will then fail to load memtes86+ over this
reserved memory area, which is the correct behaviour. For now there is no
way to circumvent this. The memtes86+ loader should be rewritten to use a
newer loading mechanism, but this will be quite a big task. It is unclear
when this will be realised.

As for Windows breaking because of overheating, that would only ruin my current install, but trying to launch either the recovery partition or a Windows install CD results in the exact same issue - it hangs on the Windows logo._________________#312470 @ http://counter.li.org/

With the CPU misbehaving due to overheat, a write address could have become corrupt so windows could have written to any random LBS on your hard drive.
This will trash random stuff (Gentoo is not safe either) but will not harm the CD boot, unless it looks around for an existing install and doesn't like what it finds.

When a CPU makes errors, anything can happen and its usually nasty. If you are really lucky, you get an illegal instruction exception and the CPU halts but as I say, anything can happen.

Neither the Windows install CD nor the MSI Recovery application will start, they both behave exactly the same - hang at the Windows logo without any errors._________________#312470 @ http://counter.li.org/

If you don't have the RAM for memtest86, you can't run Linux or Windows either. That memtest86+ failing to load is odd.

Well, I've got the same problem with 24G RAM. The RAM size is not the issue, but the available memory below 1MB. Also, I've never found a memtest86(+) which will run on an X57 system either, which is a shame.